Windows 7: Windows Mail

Hello xhuboy, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Sorry, but we cannot help you unless you let us know what issue you are having when doing the tutorial on the first page to restore Windows Mail.

My system is Windows 7 64 bit. Went thru steps to reinstate my Vista Windows Mail. Did not see win.exe file in Windows Mail so used foot note 4, however didn't have a top task bar, tools, drop down menu, etc. to complete. What did I do wrong?

Sorry about that. You did nothing wrong. It's not shown in the tutorial, but it is necessary to make the Menu Bar visible by going to:

Windows Mail folder --> Top Task Bar --> Organize --> Layout --> Click: Menu Bar.

You will then see the Menu Bar at the top, which contains the Tools option.

Cheers PB

Hi

I purchased a new Sony Vaio laptop with 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium a couple of months ago, and was very happy to find this discussion with instructions on how to activate Windows Mail which is my preferred email client. I followed the instructions and got Mail working fine.

The new laptop has been really unstable, often crashes and seems to have serious system errors.... no laptop I've owned before (Asus, etc.) has ever given me so many problems (and this one was twice the price!). I'm wondering whether this could have anything to do with the changes made to registry as part of the process of getting Windows Mail going. Is it possible, or probably not related and the laptop just has some generic error?

Anyway, I now have the very big problem that I can not receive or send any email. When I try, I get an 0x80004005 error message ("An unknown error has occurred...."- no further details given). I have looked for online help, but all Windows Mail forums are for Vista users so they are not that useful. A lot of the info I saw online seemed to blame antivirus programs for causing Windows Mail 0x80004005 error, but my Kaspersky antivirus has not caused any problems with it to date. I tried pausing, and even completely uninstalled Kaspersky and it made no difference so I'm assuming that is not the culprit.

I'm a bit stuck here- has anybody else had that error running Windows Mail on 7, and managed to sort it out?

PS I tried System Restore already- no luck..... was told that "System Restore was not successful"....

So you had the computer for two months. There must have been some Windows Upates. You should have done the Updates before reinstating Windows Mail. If not, try reinstalling the msoe.dll files in the tutorial after the Updates. (If there was a problem with the install order it would just cause Windows Mail to fail; not likely it would mess up anything else.)

Thanks. Computer was all up to date when I got Windows Mail going. I tried what you suggested with reinstalling the msoe.dll files, that didn't work unfortunately.

I think I'll clean reload the whole OS onto my computer and start over. That may also take care of all the other system instability problems I'm having. I'd like to make a backup of the 2 months worth of emails I have saved already before doing that. Is there a tutorial here on how I could back up that email? Again, all the "Windows Mail" tutorials I can find are are for Vista users.... I'm not sure if any of the details would be different on Windows 7 OS....

It should not be any different for Windows 7

Windows Mail - Messages - Vista Forums

It is extremely unlikely the registry edits contained in this tutorial would cause the types of general system error problems you're having. It only edits registry entries specifically dealing with Windows Mail. It has been extensively tested on both 32bit and 64bit Windows 7 operating sytems.

As a quick check list:

1. When running the tutorial, any changes made to the Windows Mail folder in program files should have been made to the 64bit programs files. The other Windows Mail folder in 32bit Program files(x86) should not have been modified in any way.

2. Did you have an email client program as default program before enabling Windows Mail? For example, Windows Live Mail, which can interfere with WinMail in some environments. If you have I'd suggest uninstalling it.

3. Did you install any other new programs just prior to the email error message? And if yes, have you tried uninstalling them?

4. You could try running a System File Check, which restores any corrupted system operating files by typing the followng command in the Run box: sfc /scannow

5. The method shown in the link by mithcell64 is basically the same for saving emails from Windows Mail in the Windows 7 operating system.

An alternative manual method can be used if you cannot open Windows Mail. This method saves your Email folders, Emails and Accounts in one execution. Click here for a link to that method, which shows a quick way and manual way of doing it.

In your case you would be saving the contents of the Windows Mail folder in AppData in Windows 7, not from Vista. The data should be saved to an external media such as a USB stick or DVD disc.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your help. I'm beginning to suspect that I changed the 32 bit program files instead of the 64 bit ones.... oops! Can't say I wasn't warned clearly enough. Oddly Mail still worked but I was seeing some very odd behavior.

I did a clean reinstall yesterday and went thru the process again, everything is sweet now. Backing up and re-importing mail and folders went well too. Cheers!

My Windows mail has worked great for many months ever since I followed this tutorial. Even today I used it all day. But then I shut the computer down instead of putting it to sleep and went out for a while. Now after the reboot my Mail program will not open at all.

I also noticed a trick that MS always pulls on me. I always have my computers set so that they will not download any updates but only inform me that there is one if I want it. MS will however often go ahead and just download AND install one without my permission, often or perhaps always in the middle of the night. There is one with todays date that I was unaware of. This particular one is a Windows Defender update. A System Restore will not help. I only seem to have 3 restore points and if I try to go back to the first one on the 10th it fails. I hate the way MS does business.

Am I the only one with this problem today? Could it be something other than a sneaky MS trick? I will go back and repeat all the steps I did months ago and see if that helps. Any new info that I am unaware of would be greatly appreciated.